These are, I hope, two unobjectionable new clauses, which seek clarity from the Government about what is intended in respect of the transparency reporting. One challenge we have faced for a very long time in this area is the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, very little information is kept by the Home Office or any of the other bodies about what exactly this information is used for, how many pieces of information are collected by different people and what the reasons were. This is a very frustrating state of affairs.
When we looked at the draft Communications Data Bill, we found that there was just a two-week snapshot survey of a few police forces—it was not even all of them—asking about the purposes for which communications data are used. For that reason, I have for a long time wanted proper transparency reporting from the Government and all the organisations—some
companies, such as Google, already do this as far as they can—so that we know what is being done and we can make an informed decision about whether it is being done appropriately.
Currently, we have well over 500,000 requests for communications data every year. In order to judge whether that is a large or a small number, we need to know why it was. We also need to know—we simply do not know this at the moment—how many people it relates to. Do those 500,000 requests relate to more than 500,000 people, or are there, in fact, 20 requests, say, relating to one person? We simply do not have that information.
This is not just a concern that I and various others have raised; it is something that the interception of communications commissioner raised in his 2013 annual report, in which he said:
“In my view the unreliability and inadequacy of the statistical requirements is a significant problem which requires attention.”
We must fix this; it is very important that we know. It was a bit of a shock to find, for example, that only 11.4% of requests were for national security. The vast majority were to prevent or detect crime or to prevent disorder. We should have that information available; we should know. Partly because of the lack of it, the commissioner highlighted the fact that he simply had to estimate various parameters that he was supposed to be investigating. He also said that he was concerned about “significant institutional overuse” and that the figure was “a very large number” that had
“the feel of being too many.”
We need to have the information available and published, so that we can make a proper decision.